Kerana meletakkan fiber kepada hos jauh amat mahal untuk sukarela "volunteer nature" untuk jaringan seperti ini, penyelesaian paling jelas adalah menggunakan perisian VPN sediaada untuk sambungan kedua router kepada router, dan router kepada pengguna. Ini menawarkan kelebihan lain juga, seperti, kebal dari pengitip eavesdropping luar dan tidak perlu perisian luar biasa yang mampu memberitahu kepada mereka yang berminat siapa yang menyertai jaringan tersebut.

To avoid conflict with the internet itself, any of the private subnets may be used, such as 10.0.0.0/8, 172.12.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16. The 10.0.0.0/8 subnet is preferred for having the largest addressable range, and in theory could be used for up to 16 million participants. For even larger metanets, IPv6 would have to be adopted.

The network itself is ideally arranged into a regular, repeating grid of routers. This serves to make it more decentralized, reduces choke points, and allows for more uniform traffic distribution. Work is underway for routing protocols that could take better advantage of such a topology.

Suitable VPN choices are available, if not numerous. Any robust IPsec package is acceptable, such as FreeSWAN or Greenbow. Non IPsec solutions also exist, such as OpenVPN and SSH tunneling. It should be noted that there is no requirement for a homogenous network, each link could in fact use a different VPN daemon.